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Conference on Jews and Slavery

This past October Potsdam University in Germany hosted a conference of interest to the history of the Western Sephardim . The title of the conference was ‘Colonial History – Sephardic Perspectives.’ The presentations looked at subjects relating to Conversos and Jews during the New World colonial era. A major focus on the conference was the question of slavery and the role of Jews and Jewish descendants in it. While I didn’t attend, I enjoyed reading the conference review available here.

I found this sentence most thought provoking: The issue of Sephardic involvement in slave trade becomes painful, or even that unbearable that it has to be denied altogether, only when historians take their personal assumptions and preferences or their institution’s bias into their research. For more, read the entire review!

Thank you for sending this to me. I found the summary of Boris Barth’s contribution the most interesting. I should have said that it was obvious that New Christians behaved like anybody else in the same position. I remember the case of Manuel Bautista Perez, who appeared at a great Auto de Fe in Lima on January 23rd, 1639, who was a major slave dealer and one of the most important businessmen.

Perhaps one should think about how New Christians, assuming that they were aware of Jewish teaching on how to treat slaves, actually behaved towards their slaves. Doesn’t the Rashba have a harsh comment about Spanish Jews who engendered children on Muslim slave women, and circumcised them, giving them their names and effectively making them Jewish ? Did this happen in the West Indies also ? For some strange reason, I’ve never been able to lay my hands on Jonathan Schorch’s book on Blacks and Jews ?